Analysis and Management of HIV Peptide Microarray Experiments

Abstract

Summary Objectives: To develop a tool for then easy and user-friendly management of peptide microarray experiments and for the use of the results of these experiments for the study the immune response against HIV virus infection in clinical samples. Methods: Applying bioinformatics and statistics for the analysis of data coming from microarray experiments as well as implementing a MIAME (Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment) compliant database for managing and annotating experiments, results and samples. Results: We present a new tool for managing not only nucleic acid microarray experiments but also protein microarray experiments. From the analysis of experimental data, we can detect different profiles in the reactivity of the sera with different genotypes. Conclusions: We have developed a new tool for managing microarray data including clinical annotations for the samples as well as the capability of annotating other microarray formats different to those based on nucleic acids. The use of peptide microarrays and bioinformatics analysis opens a new scope for the characterization of the immune response, and analyzing and identifying the humoral response of viruses with different genotypes.